Read Ebook: You're on the Air by Heyliger William O Keeffe Neil Illustrator

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Ebook has 1838 lines and 59884 words, and 37 pages

Joe wondered what they'd say if he told them, casually, that he intended to be an actor. Soon he'd have to tell his father and his mother. All at once his throat was dry.

Mr. Sears, teacher of English and faculty dramatic coach, checked his costume. Mr. Sears was engulfed in costumes.

"Who hasn't turned in a plumed hat--a red hat? Who--Will you please keep quiet?"

The very dark, very intense girl rushed across the auditorium and rushed back with a red plumed hat.

"Joe!" she cried. "You're not going?"

"Something to do," said Joe.

"Listen, feller," called the boy on the stage. "We're going to have a jam session."

"Can't," said Joe. They'd had a good time last June, ad-libbing and turning what had been a good show the night before into a travesty. But last year he hadn't been thinking of radio. He pushed open the auditorium door and went through the darkened corridor.

The boy on the stage snapped his fingers. "Mr. Joe Carlin," he announced, "has gone upstage"--which was a way of saying that Joe Carlin's head was starting to swell.

Joe caught a bus at the corner. Downtown, the streets, laid out before the coming of the automobile, were entirely too narrow for modern traffic. The bus, in spurts of progress, triumphed over one tight, snarled intersection after another. Stores, stores, stores went past--a parade of stores. The parade varied. Hotels with potted palms and canopies, office buildings, Munson's eight-story department store, the banks. They crept past a store with a long black and gold sign above the door and windows: LAW BLANKS--STATIONERY--BOOKS--OFFICE SUPPLIES. A gold-lettered name on the window read: THOMAS CARLIN.

Joe dropped off at a stagnated corner and walked up Royal Street. The luncheon-hour crowds jostled him, threw him out of step, got in his way. His fascinated eyes never left a red neon sign running down the face of a stone building:

F K I P

The building's entrance was narrow. A loudspeaker in the hall rasped out the station's program of the moment. An elevator disgorged a group of noisy musicians; a fat man with a cello had trouble worming his way out through the door. The elevator shot upward, while its own speaker continued the program.

"Fourth," said Joe.

He stepped out into a cheerful reception-room done in blue leather. Here another speaker gave forth FKIP's gift to the air waves. The blonde, good-looking girl at the reception-desk smiled. "Back again?"

Joe managed an uncertain grin. People lounged on the blue leather settees built out from the windows and the walls; people occupied the scattered blue chairs. Too many people around to ask about auditions.

A man burst into the reception-room out of nowhere, made a sprint across its length, and disappeared to the right toward the broadcasting studios. The blonde girl glanced at the wall clock.

"He'd better step," she said as if this were an everyday occurrence. "He has twenty-two seconds."

The radio program signed off. Abruptly a new voice said: "Miss America and what she'll wear. Munson's brings you to-morrow's styles--" The voice was somewhat breathless. Joe was sure the announcer was the man who had raced through the reception-room.

Another elevator stopped, and a woman and three girls stepped out. Nonchalantly swinging a gold chain, the woman marched off toward the studios and limbered up her singing voice with complete unconcern. The three girls stared after her in round-eyed wonder.

The blonde receptionist laughed. The laugh seemed to insinuate that everything connected with radio was slightly wacky.

Joe said an abashed: "Guess I'll look around."

A turn to the right out of the reception-room brought him to a corridor. Another speaker, set in the corridor wall, continued to tell him what Miss America would wear. He pushed against a door marked: Studios--Quiet--No Smoking. The door closed on his heels.

And now, for the first time since entering the FKIP Building, the insistent blast of radio was gone. He stood in a soundless, glass-walled visitors' gallery that had broadcasting studios on either side. He knew this gallery as he knew the hallway of his own home. Studio A, first on the right, high-ceilinged and vast, for symphony concerts; Studio B, on the left, for the song-birds of the air. Studio C.... Blue lights in a square frame said: STUDIO C--REHEARSAL.

He could look into Studio C, through the glass wall, upon a producer and a cast. Not a sound came out to him. The producer, slouched in a chair with his chin on his chest, leaped to his feet. His red hair was wild; his eyes were wilder. He seemed to be playing out a whole scene, and the cast, pencils out, furiously marked script. The rehearsal began again, and the producer, back in his chair, held his head and rocked to and fro. Then the cast must have hit what was wanted. There were smiles, good humor, and a producer who no longer looked wild.

"I wonder," Joe asked himself hungrily, "if I'll ever be doing that?"

Without warning another blue light burned in another frame. STUDIO G--ON THE AIR.

Curtains had been drawn and Studio G was blacked out. Joe's heart hammered. People were dropping their tasks and tuning in. North, south, west--Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh. Perhaps lonely ships at sea to the east on the lonely Atlantic. Six feet beyond the drawn curtains lay mystery, the alluring secrecy of the unknown. Radio!

The blue light burned steadily: STUDIO G--ON THE AIR.

"I'd give my right arm," Joe said hoarsely. There might not be so many people in the reception-room now....

The reception-room was almost empty, and excitement stirred him. He leaned across the reception desk. "I'd like to know--I mean, can you tell me--"

"You write a letter to the Director of Auditions," said the blonde girl.

Heat crawled up the boy's neck.

"I've seen so many. I always know. Tell them how old you are, where you live, what experience you've had, what parts you've played, your telephone--"

Joe managed to say: "Only high-school plays. Northend High."

"Tell them that." The blonde girl took a sheet of paper from a drawer. "Write it now. I'll send it upstairs."

There was a shock of awakening as he came to the store with Thomas Carlin on the window. Suppose--He stopped on the crowded street and a man bumped into him from the rear. Suppose his father would not hear of it? Well--He went on slowly to the store.

Black gleaming show-cases ran up the center of the polished floor; gleaming show-cases ran parallel with the two long walls. Immaculate shelves held immaculate stock. Clerks, busy with customers, gave him a swift, unobtrusive sign of greeting, and he wriggled his fingers in return. He liked the store--its brisk quiet, its atmosphere of unhurried alertness. He liked the flashing facets of light that glinted from the chrome parts of typewriters; he liked the smell, pungent and sweet, of ink and paper. He liked it all but--but not enough. Not the way he liked radio. Not the way radio burned him up.

A clerk carried a package toward the wrapping-counter. "How's the Thespian?"

Joe grinned and moistened his lips. Suppose his father didn't understand.

Tom Carlin was at the telephone in the compact rear office, and the boy knew a moment of relief. At least he wouldn't have to tell his father at once. In the deserted book department, Frank Fairchild, his father's right-hand man, quietly checked through some papers. The book department had always been something of a disappointment.

"Hello, Joe." The man calmly clipped the papers together. "Been reading anything lately?"

"No time," said Joe.

"A remarkably busy world," Mr. Fairchild commented dryly. "Nobody has time for reading. And yet here"--a sweep of his hand took in the department--"here's everything. Humor and pathos, the stories of great nations and great men, drama, and poetry and essays. You can take a book and travel to the end of the world. Romance and adventure. It's all here. Have people forgotten the magic land of books?"

"Why not remind them?" Joe asked.

"How?"

A woman entered the department and Mr. Fairchild went forward to meet her.

Tom Carlin called from the office. "I'm leaving in a half-hour. We can go home together."

"All set, Joe," his father said.

The thought stayed with him while they took the car from a parking lot and moved in crawls and spurts through the downtown traffic.

"What was the talk with Fairchild, Joe?"

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